Sabin Wine Journeys

February 1, 2025.   Morais Vineyards and Winery is a surprising outpost of Portugal off Route 17 in Bealton, Fauquier County.   José Morais opened the winery and wedding venue in 2011 promoting traditional Portuguese wines and winemaking.   His daughter, Linda, is now CEO.   Their winemaker, Vitor Guimarãis, is from Portugal - born and educated - and has been with them since the beginning.   Drive through the newer part of the vineyard adjacent to the road, and for the moment, drive straight ahead past the round tasting room into the courtyard a typically stark-white Portuguese villa which serves as a large wedding venue.   The main building, – ballroom, bar- and smaller outbuildings buildings host over 100 weddings a year.   It’s like a little village.     Our focus, however, is on the wine and we came back to the tasting room, a round stand-alone building with a cone-shaped roof, reminiscent of the roofs in Algarve.     ...

February 1, 2025.   Mitchell Harrison knew he was hearing something unusual.   A dairy farmer in rural Fauquier County, Harrison was listening to his HAM radio in the early 1940’s and overheard police radio transmissions – from Berlin, Germany.   Harrison informed the Government.   Shortly after war broke out, he got one of those offers you can't  refuse and sold the whole 700 acres of his Vint Hill Farm to the U.S. Army.   Rumor has it that Vint Hill Farm sat on top of a massive deposit of iron ore that acted as a natural antenna for broadcast reception.   By 1942, the Army established a major signals intelligence site at Vint Hill from which they could intercept Axis radio traffic.   Supposedly one such transmission detailed the Nazi’s Normandy fortifications and proved useful to the Allied Invasion on D-Day.   Through the next decades, Vint Hill continued in the spook world as an intelligence station until its functions were transfer...

January 23, 2025.   Since early January, we have been relatively house-bound due to viruses we ping-ponged between us and due to a long stretch of stubborn Siberian weather that we have been unable to evict for weeks, like a bad renter.   When we looked for some new wineries to visit, we found a number of them closed until Spring.   As a measure of our house-boundedness, here’s a little survey about one of the most essential but humble tools in the enjoyment of wine – the cork puller . I am not a helixophile, but I have amassed a small collection of corkpullers over time – they are descendants of a proud history of necessity in and of themselves.   Almost as soon as cider or wine or spirits began being stored in bottles and sealed with cork, generally in the 17 th Century, there was a need for an effective cork extractor.   The earliest corkpullers were adapted from gun worms that were used to clean unspent gunpowder from artillery and muzzleloaders. ...